Ten years after The Archies' last Saturday morning cartoon and forty-six years after the eternal teens debuted in comic book form, Archie and pals re-appeared on NBC.

The New Archies series actually borrowed from the Archie Comics Group book, Little Archie, in which all of the Riverdale gang were pre-pubescent children. The program also made some changes to the traditional comic book’s line-up (much the way Filmation had done in the late 1960’s by cutting African-American Chuck and Moose’s girl Midge.)

The New Archies did not bring those characters back into the fold, but instead added newly created Amani and Eugene in an effort to break up the all-white Riverdale for a more diverse 1980’s audience. Eugene, the school brain, also replaced earlier Riverdale egghead Dilton Doily.

Two other substantial changes to the landscape were the removal of Pop’s Chok’lit Shoppe (which transformed into Pop’s Video Café) and the re-birth of Hot Dog, Jughead’s big sheep dog, as an English terrier.

Each half-hour episode contained two stories, as opposed to the fast-paced comic blackouts of the previous decade. Also missing was ‘The Archies’ band. The New Archies ran for one season of original episodes and another season as repeats, ending its run in 1989, twenty years after "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies (a real band fronted by studio musician Ron Dante) topped the charts as the #1 single of 1969.